Class, Culture and the Education System

Abstract

The work of Screen over the last six years has clearly had a crucial significance for Screen Education — without that journal’s commitment to introduce and develop a coherent and systematic theory of film it is certain that Screen Education would not be confronting the problems of the cinema in the way that it is now doing. Furthermore, by saying that, I am affirming the debates and disagreements of the last few years as having been a necessary process and one that must be continued not just in the pages of Screen but also in Screen Education and within the work of the Society for Education in Film and Television (SEFT) as a whole. This is not to encourage an eclectic liberalism, a polemical debate in the tradition of an academic journal, but to suggest that the problems and arguments that SEFT has faced have not been the difficulty in constructing a theory of film (a conventional problem that practitioners of a subject discipline have to face) but have rather been concerned with the problems of thinking, analysing and working through problems theoretically rather than empirically.